We’ve devolved to a point in our paranoid history where remaking a movie about an off-the-grid government agency that knowingly employs a pedophiliac child killer to do its bidding could almost be as fresh as today’s headlines. Stephen King’s John Rainbird was such a man, but when it came time …
Stephen King, on the overwhelming evidence of the movie adaptations, can seldom be bothered to develop one of his ideas, but then the ideas are seldom worth developing in the first place. The idea here -- the terrible burdensomeness of supernatural powers on their possessor -- is pretty much the …
MTV jester Tom Green spreads his wings, directing himself in the role of the idiot offspring of Rip Torn (matching facial hair), taking up the gross-out gauntlet (umbilical-cord jokes, paraplegic S&M jokes, child-molestation jokes), and thus initiating a hairsplitting debate as to which he has less of -- talent or …
Moderately filthy romantic comedy, moderately amusing in compensation, about a young man with commitment issues until he meets a loosey-goosey gal who holds the high score on the Centipede machine at the neighborhood watering hole and whose favorite movie is, hold your breath, The Shawshank Redemption. (Takes all kinds.) Only …
As an explanation of romantic incompatibility, the catchphrase title is stunningly unilluminating, no matter which of its six words is stressed. (On screen, the third one stands out in green from the white of the rest, but that seems an arbitrary reading.) Satisfied with the what and incurious about the …
The unmarried pregnant drive-thru girl at Burger-Matic (logo: BM) picks up some strange sounds on her headset: the sounds of the married biological father getting frightened to death by his two stepsons in a military helicopter. The plot then thickens. The comedy may be "offbeat," but the beats are heavy …
Echoes of Best Friends: a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team writing a script about a husband-and-wife scriptwriting team. And here as there, the result contains plenty of "insider" stuff for the movie buff: the hero's graduate thesis, for instance, is called "A Semiological Analysis of Sexual Overtones in the Early Films of …
Self-reflexive, self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, and self-mocking pastiche of the private-eye genre, the directorial debut of screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, in chronological rather than alphabetical order). The hard-boiled first-person narrator, the chronically insouciant Robert Downey, Jr. ("I was tired, I …
Well, "clinically depressed" love, at any rate. Not to overstate the case. He (Chris O'Donnell) dresses by the code of Seattle grunge, but after all he lives in Seattle, and is otherwise a responsible big brother in a single-parent home. She (Drew Barrymore, tattoos concealed) is a moonlight-jet-skiing, library-book-stealing, school-skipping, …
Another story about death that’s been done to death. Toni Colette goes full-cancer, Drew Barrymore acts the part of concerned BFF, and between them, the barbed one-liners metastasize almost as quickly as the tears. Though the outcome remains the same, if given the choice, in cases of terminal illness sagas, …
Enough laughs in the first few minutes to sustain two or three average screen comedies: a music-video parody of the signature tune of a British bubblegum group of the Eighties -- "Pop Goes My Heart" by Pop!, from beginning to end -- with Hugh Grant shimmying, shaking, and pogosticking in …
The youngest copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times gets her big break as an undercover reporter on an up-to-date exposé of high school. Problem is, this mousy virgin, needlecrafter, and turtle-owner was a teenage geek, and immediately falls in now with the "wrong crowd" -- an extracurricular calculus club called …
Katt Shea Ruben's application to transfer from the cinematic gutter (Stripped to Kill, Stripped to Kill II) into the cinematic cellar: a bad-girl thriller about an adolescent sexual omnivore (Lolita tendencies, lesbian tendencies) with black-rooted bleached hair, a black leather jacket, a stick-on tattoo on her miniskirted thigh, a ring …
"Based on a true story", it says right below the title, lest you demand justification: twenty-five years of a life rerouted by teen pregnancy. The quarrel isn't with the story; it's with the pushy direction (Penny Marshall), the anemic image (Miroslav Ondricek), the cranked-up performances (Drew Barrymore, Steve Zahn, James …
Deliberately, diligently, self-contentedly conventional dead-teenager thriller: the deeds are done by a serial killer in a Grim-Reaper-by-Edvard-Munch mask. The relentless allusions to film and television ("You can only hear that Richard Gere gerbil story so many times until you have to start believing it") are supposed to lift it above …